


Schrödinger's Cat

by Eunoia2140



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: F/M, Post-Episode: s04e13 Journey's End
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-01
Updated: 2018-04-01
Packaged: 2019-04-16 23:12:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,705
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14175426
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Eunoia2140/pseuds/Eunoia2140
Summary: And it is a terribly long walk to sanity, Rose Tyler learns.





	Schrödinger's Cat

Deities and dimensions and desertions aside, Rose Tyler is furious.

And freezing.

And with a new new new Doctor beside her.

And he didn't even say good-bye.

_Does it need saying?_

Damn him.

 

+

 

The car ride is silent and cold and her trousers are soaked through but she remains stoic, never opening her eyes, fingers curled in the leather of her seat. She sits next to the ( _duplicate_ ) Doctor, sensing, sifting, shuddering because he is a ghost and will only be a ghost.

The irony is sharp on her tongue, albeit lost in translation amongst her tempest-thoughts.

He says nothing and she says nothing and the adjacent sea is awe-inspiring,  _awful_ , all at once.

He doesn't even make an attempt to hold her hand.

( _Copy_.)

 

+

 

After their journey-by-zeppelin and arrival at the mansion, Rose excuses herself to the upstairs with as little as a glance in Pete's direction. Perceptive one, he is. She appreciates his effort to at least pretend like he's her father. (For he is, some rational part of her mind thinks, and she loves him impossibly for it.)

Once she's stripped off her clothes, shed her jacket onto the tile floor of the bathroom, she steps into the spray of the shower that was on when she came through the door. Or wasn't. She can't recall.

The water is scalding; it melts away universal-residue, sea salt, and any other remnant of the woman she was. They’ve been clinging to her for the past 1,521 days; she doesn’t feel any cleaner from it. Watercolor marks make their appearance on her skin the longer she stands—sits—under the water—bruises and scars from long ago and yesterday.

He once told her time was relevant; she has ripped time apart with her teeth.

The door opens and shuts almost inaudibly, but she's been sleeping on war-swallowed planets and beside corpses for the past year and a half, give or take a few days, so she hears it without flinching. When he hesitates near the farthest sink she turns the temperature up, choking on steam and saecula lost and remembered. The glass becomes frosted with fog; he is only a smudge of blue tarnishing the too-white walls suffocating her. She wonders, frothy air curling tighter in her throat all the while, if he will become her penance, if he will act as the executioner for her euthanasia.

The irony is more bitter-sweet than earlier.

Pounding water does nothing to muffle her sobs, and he sits leaning against the shower door until she has nothing left to cry for.

 

+

 

Melting cities plague her dreams tonight, and she curses herself for allowing sleep to pull her under. That hasn't happened in weeks. She doesn't plan on letting it happen again.

A part of her wishes the not-Doctor would have snuck into her bed and cradled her as she thrashed, like the other one used to do even if they'd had a pleasant day, but she should have stomped on the hope as soon as it arose. She has grown up and it's been four years and two months and he is not the same person, either.

Dawn has just arrived by the time she makes herself a cup of tea, Earl Grey and dark as the coffee Pete pours from the pot. They talk about simple things, simple things that register in her brain and flutter away, and her gratitude for these subtly affectionate moments between them is incommunicable. He was her rock in the days where she was drowning in black holes or her own blood. So was Mickey, but he may as well be dead.

Maybe she'll weep for him tonight instead of herself.

The Doctor in blue—she's quite blithely proud of the nickname added to her ever-expanding list for this stranger—stays in his room all day and if it wasn't for Jackie would have remained there all night, but she's as stubborn as an ox, like Pete says, and she forces him to at least open his door to have a conversation with her.

An argument, really, Rose judges by the furious whispers she hears rustling down the hall. Much to her vexation, her room is opposite his, and she must maneuver past her mother in order to get there.

She ignores Jackie's frown, notes eons-old eyes downcast to the carpet, and locks her door behind her.

She indulges the possibility that maybe her night-terrors won't be able to get through thick wooden doors.

 

+

 

They live like ghosts in the mansion, hovering, shadowing, never meeting in the middle, and dolor advances in great strides in Rose Tyler.

The mirror on her wall—fragments taped together after she shattered and splintered and smashed it—reflects a broken image of the stuff of nightmares. She fingers the sharp edges of the glass, just to see if she can still feel it prick her skin, and they come away skeletal and vaguely maroon. Her clothes don't fit correctly anymore; she throws what she doesn't—can't—wear into the back of her wardrobe. Her hair clumps in her hairbrush. She throws that in the back of her wardrobe, too.

On the days when she actively interacts with anyone other than Tony, the tension in the air is palpable, and she desperately wishes Torchwood would let her break the sabbatical they enjoined her to take. Even Jake refuses to sneak her files.

“Just focus on other things right now, Rosie,” he told her one afternoon when she'd asked why. His nickname made her stomach twinge harshly, thoughts of dancing and immortals and overtly charming smiles gnawing at her mind until she was left dry heaving in Jackie's garden. At least there was nothing to ruin the flowers with.

She questions why, why, why, during her everlasting time alone.

Why he stays silent anytime she walks into the room. Why he tells Tony stories of Shakespeare and libraries but she can't even bring herself to tell her brother of blue and red buckets. Why the anguish in his eyes looks genuine while he remains eerily distant. But she doesn't try hard, either, and so she comes around to the same conclusion every time. A paradox, she thinks ruefully.

It becomes a game.

Why did _he_ leave?

Why didn't you start looking for him sooner?

Why are the monsters under your bed men in blue and pinstriped suits and leather jackets and bow ties instead of the dead?

It becomes a game, and she is more than willing to play

 

+

 

Tentatively, he comes out of hiding. Or maybe he hasn't truly been hiding, it's been her imagination, or she has been the one hiding, or—

She coughs into her book. The cough started after the black spots began dotting her vision if she moved too fast. If it grows dire, she'll tell someone, she consoles herself.

She spots him on the back-porch, leaning against the railing with curved shoulders. The setting sun twists his shadow into something from a novel meant to scare children—or perhaps it's just her. All shadows scare her nowadays.

When she was young and had unruly hair and slept beneath a pink duvet, she witnessed hundreds of sunsets with him— _not him, not him, not him_ —in every possible way. They'd rested on his overcoat in fields of blueberry bushes to watch the sky turn from cerulean to navy, climbed thick-branched trees tall enough to brush the atmosphere (he'd gotten quite cross with her refusal to put on sunscreen and, consequently, her skin's distinctly strawberry hue from ultraviolet rays), and sprinted to their blue box beauty as the clock ticked away their time to live with the dying light above them. He'd opened the TARDIS doors— _it's your_ unbirthday, _Rose Tyler, which means we must do something particularly impossible_ —and they watched a forest-spotted planet spin and spin and spin, powering down as another day came to a close, and she was peaceful, for a moment, so relaxed that she kissed his throat out of some kind of habit that had been eluding her in the moment.

He took her to see many more sunset after that, and high-necked collars suddenly became a relevant fashion statement for the two of them.

 

+

 

The first time is subdued, almost unremarkable.

She sits with Tony on the swing-set beneath the massive willow tree inexplicably grown on their front lawn, entertaining him with stories about Mickey and her getting into trouble when they were kids. He asks her to tell him a story about the stars, and the only one that comes to mind is when they were being snuffed out by gods and monsters.

He holds her hand after her gaze focuses on a single point on the horizon and she can’t bring herself to answer his question. She smiles at him with false ease.

 

+

 

The second time it's Jackie, of all people, who discerns it. Sometimes Rose forgets that her mother isn't as brash as she used to be.

The Tyler family and Jake and the half-Time Lord are settled on the porch during breakfast one morning ( _three weeks_ ) after the end-of-the-universe, enjoying the warm weather and occasionally engaging in sweet conversations about Torchwood or the day's news, or look, Jake, I know a fellow who you'd get along with really well, let me introduce you over a coffee or something next week, when Tony abruptly interrupts Rose's train of thought;

“Aren't you hungry, Rose?”

He's five now, old enough to read his older sister, old enough to know when to back off, but today doesn't seem like his day.

“Mum, she hasn't eaten anything since Wednesday,” he says to Jackie.

Rose doesn't have the energy to correct him ( _Saturday, Tony_ ), instead resting her chin on her knees, content with the unusual softness of the bottom step under her feet. She feels like she's floating, in a way.

“Rose, come on,” Jackie coaxes, using the same voice she used to when Rose was young and sick in bed. At the grave silence she receives, she says, a bit more firmly, “Rose.”

And that's it.

Rose rockets from her seat and walks down the flattened dewy grass path made by Tony while he was playing before breakfast, hands shoved in her pockets while her lips are sealed shut. She makes it to the gravel road before he catches up with her, body mirroring hers. Pete found spare clothes in a box buried in his closet from God-knew-who and donated them to this new new new Doctor until after he adjusted and could find time to purchase anything he desired. But as of now his outfits consist of crisp Oxfords and jeans.

It's unsettling seeing him in jeans. It makes him even more of a stranger to her.

He doesn't break their twenty-one day streak of silence.

Damn him.

They walk until she cannot walk anymore, and he carries her home.

 

+

 

The third time is completely and utterly her fault.

It's the middle of the night and she is well-aware that she's not in her best mindset, but the bottle of vodka on the island in the kitchen looks awfully enticing. The cap cracks, a planet breaking at its core, and suddenly there's nothing left in it and she's out in the yard with shards of glass in her hands and a dangerous amount of alcohol in her veins.

She fancies if she cut deep enough it would spill out of her in tendrils of gold and red, and perhaps her eyes would glow as it happened, as they had when she'd witnessed the birth of the universe and the death of trillions of species, conducted the laws of time and space with her fingertips. She'd dreamt about splitting her heart in two, not long after Canary Wharf—her blood had been hot and thick and satisfying. A little too godly; a little too human. It could have been a beautiful sight.

The glass is cold and sharp and delicious in her grip, cutting into her palms like the beginning of the end, finally her story on the verge of its conclusion—

And of course he's there, tearing the hazardous object from her grasp and she's screaming at him to let her go and forget about her or to just do it and get it over with. Something sticky and warm wets her fingers and her lips when she cups her hands over her mouth, afraid of the wolves that hide in the nighttime. Yet she is blissfully unaware of everything but the grief streaming down her face. Not the mud under her shins, nor the rain suddenly pouring down from collecting clouds. Not the gashes on her palms, nor the way her head swims with too much drink and not enough reality.

The tension building up in her for years is seeping out with ever clap of thunder that rumbles her chest, and he keeps his arms locked tight around her waist even after she collapses on the ground. He's whispering something into her dripping hair, a mantra of some sort, but she can't hear him over the deafening silence that accompanies the thump of her hollow heart.

He carries her home again.

 

+

 

“I'm sorry.”

The Doctor looks up sharply at her from his seat next to her bed, marking the novel he's reading with a paperclip. (He used to use all kinds of miscellaneous items when they'd sit and read in the library.) His glasses have slid down his nose and he removes them slowly, placing them down on the cover of the book, leaving both on the nightstand.

“I'm sorry,” she repeats, biting her lower lip to hide the tremors rocking her body. Her eyes are stinging and she finds herself frustrated for the millionth time because she's cried rivers and rivers and somehow there's still tears to shed. Of all the times to do so, words decide to evade her now, swiftly being replaced with unexpected vulnerability and dogged fatigue. She doesn't like it very much.

“Rose,” he enunciates carefully, and she launches herself off the pillows, crushing their lips together.

This kiss is similar to the first; it is still a kiss of desperation and endless hours of if/thens and missed opportunities. But there's something distinct about the way they explore each other now, a remarkable instinct to come together completely, both for tangibility and for the simple reason that they finally can.

She pulls him to the bed, encouraging him with lips and teeth and tongue that the thermal shirt he dons needs to be slipped off, and he complies as if he was made to carry out her every request.

Instead of advancing any further, however, Rose leans back, heavy-lidded with sleep and lust and joyous to see his pupil-filled eyes. She traces his face, recalling each crinkle and bone from days engraved in her past, when she was naïve and high with the promise of forever. She kisses him once more, chastely this time, before tugging him down to her side, curling into him, basking in his protection and warmth.

They fall asleep as the sun rises.

 

+

 

Time passes, and the struggle is unlike anything she's ever faced before. Worse than monsters and hostile aliens, her own demons threaten to pop her seams open permanently, and it's agony to experience.

Her days become echoes of those when she had a proper schedule, every hour compartmentalized into stepping stones which would bring her closer to him. While she clocked her own time then, the Doctor does it for her now, and she's frustrated beyond belief that he makes decisions for her again.

The hours tick away, precisely, orderly, the same for two solid weeks: Her nightmares wake her. He asks her to eat. She tells him no. He lets it go. Later on, when the sun has reached its peak in the sky he comes back and reads to her for a few hours and she listens quietly, enjoys his soothing presence, one she thought she would never get back. He asks her to eat once more. She says no. A fair amount of kissing ensues, somehow or other, and suddenly she's got a bowl of broth in her stomach as he helps her down the stairs, out the door and into the garden. Rose listens to his speeches about the flowers and multiple butterfly species that land on their bench—well, the only bench in the garden, but they've made it into their bench by carving circles and lines and other symbols into the wood, rubbish to anyone but the Doctor. He takes her back to her room long after the moon makes its appearance, and he coaxes something solid into her. More kissing and reading, and then he climbs into bed next to her and she listens to his heartbeat as she succumbs to sleep.

Most days it is harder than others. There's screaming and sobbing on her part, grimacing and firm words on his. She's certain she deserves to die after all the things she's seen, all the things she's done. Control is a too-lacking factor in her life; if she can only do so with one thing, it will be what she puts into her body.

The Doctor instantly understands this, understands her as he always has, and never rises to the bait she throws at him on her bad days. On the days when she tells him to simply leave and never return ( _leave like he did, because I wouldn't want me either_ ), or if she's feeling particularly colorful, to stop fucking helping her because she can do it on her own, she's alright.

She's always alright.

“Tony told me you said the same,” he says softly into her hair after another fit, and she bites the cloth of her sleeve to keep her breath steady. “Endlessly. He told me he was very young and it was every day for a long time. He said you cried and cried and cried, so he did, too, until they stuck something in you and you stopped.”

Rose shifts on his chest as he takes a deep breath, waiting for the answer to his unasked question. She pounds lightly above his right ribs to satisfy him.

“How many times?” he asks.

“Too many.”

“I'm sorry.”

This time she doesn't lie.

 

+

 

Shopping with him is the most fun she's had in months.

Rose picks out shirts and trousers and shoes for him to try on, and licks her teeth at the way the store attendants fawn over him, praising his handsome features and remarkable hair. Mostly she stands in the shadow of the dressing rooms, writing a mental checklist of long-sleeved beauties and distasteful footwear. The Doctor insists he can wear his Converse with any outfit; she tells him to live a little. The smile she receives is as brilliant as any sun she's ever seen.

Rose determines that deep purples, maroons, and dark blues suit him extremely well. Unintentionally when she tells him this as a passing comment, the rest of the trip goes by rather quickly because he knows now to buy every article of clothing meeting those specifics.

They stop at the park on their way home and sit on the hood of the car to enjoy the sunset. The Doctor reaches through the sunroof to produce one of the numerous ties he bought, and knots it around his neck.

“At least I can still do this,” he says, beaming at her.

Rose twists the pinstriped silk around her fingers and kisses him senseless.

 

+

 

Two months and approximately five days is how long it takes for her to smile. Unsurprisingly, he is the one who manages to cajole it out of her.

“Rutabaga. And ramuliferous.” He waggles a brow at Rose, tilting his head back from its position on her lap. “Go on, I said two.”

“Reproach,” Rose hums, looking at the stretch of sky above them, “rebullition, and rannygazoo.”

“Rannyga—that's not even a word!” the Doctor exclaims, throwing his hands in the air.

“Shut up. Means foolish nonsense. Think you'd know it rather well with how you talk.”

He calms after a few moments, muttering the word under his breath as if tasting it. Rose rolls her eyes.

She says, “You're on four.”

The Doctor sits up, jamming his elbow in the juncture of his bent knee and gazes at her with an amused, lazy smile. “Recherché,” he purrs, radiating happiness when she flushes despite her attempts to brush him off. “Razzmatazz, rathe, and....oh! I've got it: Raxacoricofallapatorious.”

The corner of her lips quirks up, hesitation in her eyes, but it dissipates instantly and a grin broader than the Milky Way blinds him. He laughs and she laughs and everything seems, for the first time, perfect.

 

+

 

Rose wakes most nights screaming.

Neither of them are caught off-guard.

At first it was the Doctor who would need comforting during the late hours of darkness, when his home and past caught up to him too quickly. He'd scare himself awake, but Rose never slept anyway; she'd become accustomed to spending long hours in his room reading. Once they discovered that sharing a bed regularly was an option, they slept together every night. His nightmares immediately began to lessen; hers grew worse.

She falls back to the times when she would doze in mass graves and sip tea in mortuaries. Times when the sky was burning and she was dying and her blood clotted her lungs. She dreams of Donna Noble and a Time Lord in pinstripes, lips chapped and blue,  _can’t believe he went out like that, surrendered to water of all things_ —

He's there to hold her, but this time it’s different.

“Rose,” he begins, gentle and apologetic because he knows, he's just that clever, and she's  _done_  with this, she's done with all of it.

“Don't,” she pants, throwing a leg over his hips. ( _Rose Tyler, Defender of the Earth; Rose Tyler, Bad Wolf; Rose Tyler, too late—_ ) Her lips are harsh and coarse against his, taking and demanding impossibly but he gives and gives and gives. She tugs roughly at his hair, sending shivers down both of their spines, and she's never been more furious. Their mouths meet sloppily in the middle as she grinds against his leg, frantic to the point where it scratches the insides of her thighs. It doesn't matter.

“Rose, listen—” His hips shifting to jut against hers. Fingers leave bruises on her waist.

“ _You_ ,” she hisses, rocking harder, faster, “I asked you not to and you did. I  _told_ _you_ —”

“I know,” he gasps, head tipping back and she sinks her teeth into his pulse. He moans. “I didn't mean to.”

“Yes, you did. You're a liar.” She moans with him this time, and in an achingly familiar way it sounds like wolves howling. “ _You're a liar_.”

If her hands shake a little more than usual, she won’t remember in the morning.

“Your ridiculous hellos and your damn adventures and your stupid fucking—” She breathes hotly into his mouth, biting his lower lip as shocks electrify her every cell, and she can feel him tremble beneath her with aftershocks. “—goodbyes. Don't you ever try to do that again—”

“Never,” he pacifies her, promises, and  _oh_ , how raw and innocent those words sound from a new perspective. He's ravaging her throat with his teeth, leaving new watercolors to leak into her skin.

Breathing hard, she clutches his shoulders, fingers digging into sinewy muscle. “Never say never, ever.”

His smile is wolfish.

 

+

 

“Honestly, Rose, the concept and evidence of Schrödinger's cat is—unprecedented. Magnificent.”

“Extraordinary?”

The Doctor grins.

She takes the bottle of bourbon from his grip and gulps the rest down, tossing the empty glass to him—which he fumbles with and ultimately drops onto the plush carpet. Then she hops the bar to rummage through half-empty bottles.

They've been loitering in the long-since abandoned luxury hotel for the past three hours, and, having discovered its surplus of alcohol behind the bar, spent their time making it disappear. Rose idly tilts her head to gaze at the ceiling, audibly swallowing at the intricate designs covered in thick coats of dust.

“Such a pretty place,” she says. “Such an unnecessary waste.” She loses interest in her task, meanders over to the carpet where the Doctor stands.

He scoffs. “You've just rhymed expertly, Rose Tyler.” Then his arms wrap around her waist, pulling her towards him and he buries his face in her neck. She unabashedly leans into his touch.

“‘Let us go then, you and I,’” he breathes against her pale skin. “‘When the evening is spread out against the sky—’”

“‘Let us go through half-deserted streets . . . the muttering retreats . . . of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels—’”

“You skipped a line,” he murmurs.

“You skipped a line,” she replies, and kisses the back of his hand. Alcohol makes her sentimental. “We should go.”

“There's still a few bottles left.”

“I want to be coherent enough to walk home.”

He sits suddenly in one of the old chairs littering the lobby, pulls her down onto his lap, nipping at her neck, soft, aging velvet all the while rubbing against her knees. Modesty isn't a concern at the moment—he has his lips latched onto her jaw and his hands under her shirt.

“What about,” she says thoughtfully, albeit breathing hard, “what about Tennyson?”

Her larynx vibrates with his hum of approval. “‘Give me my robe, put on my crown; I have . . . immortal longings in me.’”

“Am I an empire for you to plunder and conquer?”

“Worship, rather,” he corrects.

“Shakespeare, rather.”

“Too much wine.”

“That was four bottles ago.” She stills in his arms, a hand tugging at his thick hair, gaze centered on the lights blinking from across the street. “Let's go.” He whines beneath her; she presses her lips to his forehead in consolation. “The carnival is here for the week, remember?”

The carnival lacks the glamour of the hotel—and the alcohol supply. But Rose doesn't mind, especially not when the Doctor accidentally trips over the generator, turning on the array of fairy lights lining each ride.

The swings are alluring beneath yellows and reds. Her eyes glow in their reflection on the rungs around her, golden and ethereal.  _Bad Wolf_. 

The Doctor clear his throat. Rose ignores him and jumps off the platform, scarlet dress fanning out around her—a rose, she muses, falling from grace. Well—fallen would fit better perhaps.

He trails her to the carousel, follows her wandering hand on chipped horses' manes with his dark eyes.

“Do you remember,” she asks ruefully, “when you left me for a horse?” Her fingers curl into the rough fabric of a stallion's saddle, and a tactfully wide grin twists her mouth. “‘My kingdom for a horse!’ His name was Arthur.”

Something austere passed over his already shuttered eyes, and she knows the words he is about to say like a soldier knows the trigger of a gun.

“Rose—”

The horse's head collapses with the force of her fingers, her strength being sapped from an unfathomable source deep in her bones. For a moment the lights flicker and Rose wonders what she would do if they went out.

“My darling Tybalt, so passionate and benighted.” 

The fire within her burns each word.

“That's what you told me when you left me on that beach the second time. ‘Born in battle. Full of blood and anger and revenge,’ yeah? Sounds a lot like Miss Capulet's cousin to me, don't you agree?”

She's taken off before he can even reach for her, off to the Ferris Wheel on the edge of the property. The Doctor catches up with her quickly, much too quickly, and her chest is tightening in an all-too familiar way, her blood rushing so violently she wishes she could claw her veins to shreds and watch the gold pour out.

It is too much and not enough.

She dents a chestnut-colored cart with a simple slap of her palm against wood.

Alcohol makes her sentimental.

Rose keeps her distance from the Doctor, foot poised on the edge of a bar at her knees as if she's threatening him that she'll climb, climb, climb until she reaches the top and  _poof_ : Good-bye, Rose Tyler. Perhaps she is.

“If I am Tybalt, then you can only be dearest Rosalind,” he tells her, nudging her cobalt Converse with his elbow.

Instead of scoffing, as is her initial reaction, she tilts her head to the side, considering. “Broke poor Romeo's heart. That's very me.” She grins that vacant grin at him again. She can read the pain in his features as easily as the constellations.

“Not that Rosalind.” The Doctor pulls himself up to stand next to her, to face her, and she has lock her knees to keep from taking a step back. She's never been fond of touching the dead; he hasn’t either. “‘The people praise her for her virtues.’”

“Oh.” As if flipped by the hand of some celestial being, the solidity beneath her feet shifts and she nearly topples over, save for the Doctor's arms immediately wrapping around her waist. She shakes her head to rid herself of ghosts.

“Good thing we didn't bring any more with us.” His smile is bright but equally spurious. “I like you when you're tipsy. Well, a little more than tipsy at the moment...but you're softer.” He cups her cheek with his hand, the hand from which he had been grown/born/created. It heats her skin despite the chilly air. “Less battle-molded. Less sad.”

“I'm fine," she says hastily. Why does she bother anymore? He hasn't believed her since Day One.

After ages of silence, she closes her eyes, collapsing out of his grip and into the cart she'd maimed. “They don't,” Rose tells him. “Praise me. The people don't praise me for my virtues or my actions or my anything. They regret the day they met me.”

He sits down, shoulder brushing hers. “You don't know that.”

Rose curses the tears filling her eyes, and turns to him. Her sneer is there but absent of any tangible scorn. She misses the days when they would go to every amusement park and circus and carnival in the neighboring galaxy and make a day of it. Rose Tyler and the Doctor, in the TARDIS as it should be. Now it sends agony down to her fingertips by simply remembering.

Her smile mirrors her soul, and her soul has always mirrored his.

Rose says, “I should. I've slept with corpses, Doctor; I think I really ought to. What I did—”

“We did,” he interrupts coolly.

“—I do,” she continues, unfazed, “is unforgivable. When do the maths crank out an average? When does that average turn into expiation?”

“You can't force your atonement, Rose.”

“Macbeth would say differently. Or is it Lady Macbeth? They both died in the end.”

Stars litter the night sky, reminding her of the time Tony had dropped glitter on her pants. She'd nearly thrown the damn things out right there: the silver glittered in the shape of Cygnus, brash and bold and opening poorly healed wounds.

“I'll die in the end, too.”

The Doctor intertwines their fingers together, and she feels sick with grief. His strength only drags her under, wave after wave consuming her, and she knows she’s being unfair but she is human and selfish. “We both will.”

“Take your love to someone who wants it.”

“I’m not him,” he says after a moment.

“You’re not him.”

He squeezes with no more intensity than a dying man. “You don’t have to stay. I don’t have to stay. He left you with a burden, but it’s not your responsibility to take its weight—it’s mine.”

“Will you be Paris, then?” Rose finally meets his eyes, vision blurred. “Rendered mortal by love?”

“Timon.”

“Ophelia.”

He kisses her softly. “Antony and Cleopatra.”

“Venus and Adonis,” she smiles against his mouth.

She pulls away only to embrace him, resting her chin on his shoulder, fingers splayed between his vertebrae. His suit feels like the time-worn pages of her favorite book, and she suddenly knows what’s it’s like to hold the universe in her hands, not as a goddess but as a human. He feels like a thousand days running from vigilantes, nights spent leaning against the TARDIS console talking until something went wrong, red and blue buckets, 19th century fabrics and jewels, deductions and New Earth grass and supple leather jackets. He feels like home.

“I love you,” Rose says quietly.

He hugs her tighter, trembling in her grip because she hasn’t said those words to him since he ( _not him, not him, not him)_ disappeared on the beach. “Liar.”

“I miss you.”

“Him.”

“No.” A tug on his hair, deep whisky eyes boring into his own. “You.”

The ambiguity falls and rolls, and she watches the gears shift and turn behind his irises, building up a response only to tear it down. Through her less than sober haze, she mills over the consequences of those three devastating words she'd said coupled with obscure pronouns and admissions. Karma—or fate, or destiny, or whatever the hell it is—has a way of slipping between the tales she dares to tell, or fails to, for that matter—but she isn't in the mood to overanalyze dissonant disclosures at the moment. Her blood is thrumming in her veins and her head feels a little too top-heavy and he's looking terribly fetching in the honey colored lights.

“I'm him,” says the Doctor, tilting his head to the side and allowing his hands to rest at the dip of her waist. “Same DNA, same memories—I've told you that before. _He_ told you that before. Only thing is—” He leans in close, lilacs and cerulean highlighting his cheeks, and he looks bizarrely celestial. “He wanted to give you away to save you. He couldn't keep the promises he made, and it scared him. To say he would stay with you forever and watch you die, without a chance to have a family. He wanted to spare you the grief.”

Rose bites back a name tinged with the ill-effects of binge drinking, a word carrying the weight of buried bitterness and impatience because, quite frankly, she's had enough of the Doctor making assumptions and decisions on her own behalf without even consulting her.

“Why did he not say good-bye, then?” she grounds out after a deep breath. “If he knew it was the end, why wouldn't he say good-bye?”

“Farewells hurt.”

“But _why_?”

There's only one answer to that question, they both know it, and his only response is a pained smile.

“In a way he was trying to live up to his name,” he says. “Maybe that was the part of him wishing—pretending so desperately—to be human.” Considering his own speculation, he squares his shoulders slightly, jaw tightening. “Maybe that's where I was born from. The selfish side. The carnal side. The side that allowed him to feel too much too fast, and it may be exquisite to humans but it's devastating to a myth.”

“A fairy-tale,” Rose practically growls, something foreign yet undeniably familiar flaring up beneath her skin once more as she accepts his firm kiss out of nowhere.

“The Big Bad Wolf,” they say, softly and all at once.

She angles her head towards the murky sky after a few minutes, tied to him only by his seeking lips and hands. He breathes lightly against the taut skin of her throat. “I've been lacking on my job,” she says. At his confused silence she elaborates, huffing out a thin laugh as a preface; “I was supposed to heal you. Make you better. But all I've done is made the situation turbid.”

“Rose,” he says reverently, like it's a prayer, like she's a vision sent to him from beyond the universe. He says it as if he's apologizing. “I love you.” Like there's no need for a deeper explanation for his sentiment. Like she's been healing him despite her doubts.

The sharp end of those damn words, she notices, has been banished; it no longer pains her to hear him say them. She smiles brilliantly at him.

“Quite right, too.”

 

+

 

“When do you think it'll be done?”

Rose licks her lips. The console hasn't even begun to form yet. “Tony—”

“I'd say another three years at the least.” The Doctor pats an immature coral strut branching from cream-colored tiles beneath his feet. “Sorry, Tony. But cheer up; soon as it's fully grown you'll be the first to ride.”

Tony's eyes widen. “Really?”

The Doctor grins, but keep his gaze trained on Rose. “When have I lied to you?”

 

+

 

They travel to every continent, see every landmark city and then some, but never mention, not in Paris or New York or Dreasdin, and especially not in Bodø. He takes her down narrow streets in Barcelona and she giggles into his shoulder in Queenstown. South Africa is exquisite and Turkey makes London seem drab.

Something shifted in the days after the beach, an odd sense of magnetic plates moving in both of their minds, but Rose had been so caught up in her own wounds and _him_ that she hadn't thought much of it. Still, the only language they exchange is that of blissful ignorance. She's grown tired of confrontation and has come to enjoy brief moments of happiness. She'd thrived off of them for years, after all.

“Don't drop me,” she gasps against his cheek as his fingertips paint a faint blush over the skin above her skirt. They are in Venice, Italy, of course, hidden on a dock built over the outskirts of the Adriatic Sea. The shade cools their burning faces, and the air smells of salt and roses.

“Would I, though?” he teases, then pushes her back to the edge of the dock. She shrieks and he reaches for her hips, but she slaps his hands away as her balance regains control.

“Prat,” she huffs.

It is fall and pushing a temperature that echoes summer. Sweat makes her skin glow; he looks absolutely undone. They've been in their honeymoon phase since September.

Catching her breath for a moment, Rose stares into small emerald waves lapping against the stone wall to her left, and falls back to Normandy Beach on June 6th, 1944, when she struggled in seawater heavy with blood and the lost souls of too many children shot dead. It was a parallel universe (she had spent weeks afterwards conjuring up a thousand different ways she may have experienced the event in her own universe) and the Nazis had won the battle by storm and hellfire. She had been submerged into the midst of ruthless gunfire, had a bullet embedded into her shoulder, and met a medical boy who had just been granted the title of Doctor that morning. She didn’t even catch his name before the dimension cannon sent her stumbling somewhere else.

Later on, after a few jumps in the following months, she landed in the same place but a day too late. The boy's body had been rock-solid, his skin shriveled with salt, and his eyes were open, glassy, lips parted as if crying out for his mother.

She'd ripped the helmet off his head and torn the shrapnel from his skull with her fingers. Then she baptized him in tears.

“You traveled so long,” says the Doctor, and Rose is stricken where she stands, swaying gently in the breeze. His voice is soft, low, carefully waking her from her dreams. “You lived decades.”

“So have you. Properly.”

“Rose—” The words stick to his throat; she can sense his apprehension. His desperation. She has been blinded by her own fears recently, rendered utterly useless regarding his own terror, save for hollow reassurances, and it is only now that she truly comprehends the extent of his agitation.

She stumbles to him but pauses with her fingers reaching for the lapels of the suit he dons. Words she has wished to say since they first met—questions and metaphors and all sorts of incomprehensible, rather pointless, fragments of language—bubble in her throat and make her tongue heavy, but empathy has become a difficult attribute for her to tap into ever since her first dimension-jump, and she feels as helpless as ever.

“You lost everything,” she tries, and despises her inflection and how she can't bring her hand to cover his (single) heart, and damn it all, why is this so difficult after all this time?

“And you didn't?”

How does he mange it, she wonders. How does he continue to put her first when she's chipped away at him for endless months?

Rose smiles at him, her best Mona Lisa smile, and her confession is sticky on her tongue, the delicious secret of a woman long since dead. “No. I got you.”

The Doctor shakes his head and pulls away, and she nearly falls from the lack of support but he stares at the horizon miles away, analyzing her words. He runs a shaking hand through his hair, knotting it in the thick strands as if to distract himself.

“There's something else, isn't there?” Rose asks suddenly.

Anguish passes over the Doctor's face, faint and controlled, and she shudders at what it alludes to.

“Gone,” he says. “I felt it. This morning. Something happened to him after all this—” he takes the time to wave a hand through the air “—but that was identifiable a week after he left, and with the time differences I don't know exactly how much time has passed for him compared to us. Today—now our connection, it's, it's snapped. Rose, I think he—”

“I know.”

“It hurts, Rose; I think something's happened to the TARDIS, too, and it feels like my head is being split –”

One step and she has him in her arms, trembling like a child lost in the world.

“I'm sorry, I'm so sorry,” she whispers against his head where it is bowed to her lips. “He's okay, it's okay, the TARDIS, she's fine—”

“You don't know that.” Weakly murmured to their feet, swallowed up by the sounds of the sea. “I don't know that. How can I not know that? I can't even feel it, Rose, I've lost the beat of the TARDIS's heart, and it's like he's been ripped from my head and it _hurts_.”

 _It always does_ , she wants to say. _The universe is not kind_.

She holds him, wondering if the heartbeat she feels in the right of his chest is true, or if it is simply an echo of the sea.

 

+

 

“So was that a marriage proposal?”

The Doctor simply shifts his hands from behind his head to his sides, tongue poking the inside of his cheek as he considers her words.

“Well, if it was it wasn't very smooth, as far as the look on your face,” he says.

Rose nudges his shoulder with hers and grins at the night sky, spotted with lights glowing so brightly that they’re unmistakably planets. They are laying on his jacket somewhere in the south of France, shivering occasionally in the cold. “They aren't as spectacular from down here.”

“Is that an insult?” the Doctor asks, flummoxed, and cranes his neck to nibble on the shell of her ear.

“‘M just teasing.” She sighs. “I can't wait until the TARDIS is ready to travel again.”

“Rose Tyler, I take you across the globe, kiss you in every country—”

“Shag,” she politely corrects.

“—and yet you still aren't satisfied.” He rolls on top of her, corners of his lips curling. “And before you can conjure up a counter remark to that, I'll have you know that I am just as eager to immerse ourselves back in the universe.”

“I would say yes.” Rose plays with the fringe falling in his eyes, a result of the brief rainfall they'd witnessed after they'd laid his jacket on the grass. Go figure. “You just have to ask properly this time.”

“Okay,” he croons, dipping down to steal a kiss before yanking her to her feet. She laughs in his arms, swatting at his shoulder.

He takes each of her hands in his, slowly beginning to sway to some imaginary music resounding in his head; a testament to all those years ago, when he wore leather and she was ignorant to oblivion. Above them, stars of all luminosities glow like diamonds settled in onyx, and Rose wonders, briefly, if a crack will ever reopen between them and the dead will walk once more.

She presses her cheek against his chest at the thought, reveling in the rumble she feels there.

“Is that ‘Fly Me to the Moon?’“

“Well, you've always fancied Frank Sinatra. Even knew that before I started wearing Converse.”

“I never played his records, though. I never even mentioned him until that day on Boromeo.”

“I'm just that good, Rose Tyler.” He beams, moonlight painting his teeth cloud-white. “I know you like the back of my hand. Or both arms, if you'd prefer, since you aren't very fond of the hand which was cut off—”

“I like it,” Rose interrupts, bringing the appendage in question up to her lips. “I love your hand. And your arms. And you. I love you.” Those three words that had once been a death sentence are now a promise; a promise of forever, in a mortal sense, but oh, how spectacular mortality is.

It’s been so long since they were forced to learn what the weight of gravity felt like, and she revels in it, in the pull on her shoulders and heart, in the pull between them. They’ll be just fine, she thinks. More than fine—fantastic.

He stares at her, stares like he used to in another life, when he thought she wasn’t looking. Like she’s crafted every constellation by hand and winds the clock of time every morning and every night. Like he’s seeing her for the very first time.

“Rose Tyler—” he starts, and she _knows_ and grins.

“Yes,” she says. “Forever.”


End file.
